Vietnam/Journal Challenge #2, sort of
For this challenge I have chosen Vietnam, since I haven't yet gone to Macau. I never in my life thought I would travel to Vietnam. It was never an interest of mine to travel to, but my friends convinced me. We travelled to Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. I noticed at first that it was very small city, with thousands of vespas taking over the streets. As we were in the taxi we were all so stressed and nervous as there is no such thing as lanes in Vietnam. Every single person riding a vespa makes their own lane and expects the cars to stop for them. There were times that we came pretty close to hitting people on the vespas but the cabbie didn't seem to worry, he was used the busy streets I guess. Being tourists in this city was interesting because we didn't see much of any Americans, so you can only assume that we were being stared at. Some locals got pissed off at us that we would stop and take pictures of what we saw around us...so a few rude people didn't care that they shoved us out of their way. The streets with markets we walked down were all categorized. There would be streets with just stores selling one item. I guess it is a way of organizing and making it easier for the people buying.
We also travelled to the island of Cat Ba and stayed two nights there. It was very much like a tropical island. Huge rocks were lining the shore which was a great sight to see. The people were nicer over here and greeted us with the biggest smiles. We certainly felt more comfortable out of the city.
On the island we found a lot of places which were related to the Vietnam War. We came across a memorial as we were hiking, and we found old bunkers and cannons that were still intact.
As us college students, we obviously wanted to purchase a conical hat to remember our time in Vietnam, and we wore the hats most of the trip.
